Coconut Recipes

We had a family gathering.Made some All bread pudding recipes call for the same set of ingredients: dry bread, milk, cream, eggs and sugar. This particular version is both familiar and new at the same time. For the bread, I used panettone left-over from the holidays that got a little dry. I also added coconut cream to the traditional heavy cream to pump up the flavor.

We served the bread pudding at a large family gathering, alongside a deliciously decadent caramel-rum sauce. Check back tomorrow to get the recipe for the bread pudding sauce!

Bûche de Noël is known by many names. Whether you call it a Yule Log, roulade or simply a roll cake, few desserts are as synonymous with Christmas. For this recipe, the roll cake I used is a simple, coconut-flavored génoise. It's basically a sponge cake. The filling is a mango and rum ganache and I made a chocolate rum butter-cream to cover the log.

When I was a kid in France, we used to buy a Yule Log every year. It may seem strange, but the flavor we would always get was mango. It's like a warm tropical breeze on a cold winter night. Though mango is clearly not a traditional holiday flavor, once you try this Bûche de Noël, you won't go back to vanilla and chocolate.

Banana fritters, or chuối chiên in Vietnamese, can be found on street corners throughout Saigon. Aunt Elise, who is visiting us from Vietnam, has been teaching me many Vietnamese recipes, and today she showed me how to make these tasty treats. It's been a lot of fun learning about my culture and of course, the food, from someone who spent her whole life in Saigon.

The batter that the bananas are coated in is very similar to tempura batter. To make it a touch sweeter, we added some banana and banana extract. The fritters are usually eaten as is, but I wanted to make them a little fancier. I prepared a decadent mascarpone dip flavored with ginger, Vietnamese mint and coconut. The dip, though non-traditional, provides a nice contrast to the texture of the fritters. It's a taste of Vietnam that you won't be able to resist.

Recently, the local Asian market began carrying loads of fresh coconuts. They are really popular in my house. We usually just eat them plain, but today I felt like making a sweet dish with the coconuts.

I mixed a thickened crème anglaise made of heavy cream with the coconut water. I used heavy cream instead of milk because I wanted the final product to remain creamy even though I substituted in coconut water for some of the dairy. The result was a creamy and decadent pudding. I garnished the dessert with some toasted, sweetened, shredded coconut, and it was ready to serve. If you can find some young coconuts in your local market, give it a try!

The whole family went last weekend to our favorite dim-sum place and we had a sweet coconut red rice soup with corn for dessert. I've probably said it before, but Asian desserts are not always the most glamourous-looking sweets.

Looks can be deceiving though, and the girls love it so much that they asked me to make it at home. Give it a try!